


heroes (for ever and ever)

by luninosity



Category: Actor RPF, Captain America (Movies) RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Friends to Lovers, Happy Ending, Love Confessions, M/M, Magic, Marriage Proposal, Not Really Character Death, Prophecy, Quests, Realization, Recovery, Temporary Character Death, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-26
Packaged: 2018-05-14 21:19:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5759185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone knows Sebastian’s a fairy, but for a fairy he doesn’t do anything much. Finding a lost kitten or two, healing Chris’s little brother’s broken arm, somehow always in the kitchen when blueberry pie exists. Barely magical, really, but it’s a good omen for the kingdom to have a fairy around. </p><p>He’s Chris’s best friend. He has been for almost two decades.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ViperSeven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViperSeven/gifts).



> For a lovely friend, as a thank-you for the support. *hugs*
> 
> Title courtesy of David Bowie, because it fit too perfectly.

Fairy-companions aren’t unheard-of. Unusual, but not unheard-of.  
  
Chris can’t remember a time without his.  
  
Well, okay, technically he _can_ , he’d been about fourteen when Sebastian had turned up at the palace for the afternoon open session, looking like any other finely-dressed twelve-year-old boy, walking in wide-eyed alongside every petitioner new to court. The difference, of course, had been that for those huge storm-blue eyes everything human was new.  
  
The difference had been that Sebastian wasn’t and never would be human.  
  
The last prince with a fairy-companion had been just over two hundred years ago, outside anyone’s lifetime but recent enough to be well-documented in history books, and they’d fought as brothers-in-arms to hold the country together during the Great Civil War. They’d been heroes; statues sit atop civic monuments and observe the horizon benevolently. Chris has always liked that story. About heroes.  
  
Their kingdom hovers right at the edge of the Northern Wild; beyond the border lies Fairyland and magic and perilous enchantment. Occasionally periwinkle-furred foxes or small swooping firebirds flit over; crops grow permanently green and lush, and trade with more southern realms reflects the wealth and the indefinable glinting ethereal edge to homespun lace and shawls and sugar-berries. In general people in Chris’s kingdom regard magic with a sort of grimly resigned humor: power might level mountains, which could be good or bad. Most villages have at least one wise man or a woman who can tell you where to best dig your well or a smith with a surprisingly delicate hand; tales of fighters with an extra sixth sense, or trackers who could follow the wind, or someone’s great-great-aunt once-removed being able to make roses bloom mid-winter, are as common as grass but less believable. Most people’ve never seen a fairy.  
  
Or they hadn’t. Until Sebastian.  
  
Everyone in the kingdom knows Sebastian’s a fairy. Chris glances sideways at him as they stand beside the throne. His mother’s bestowing land-gifts to a new baron, who beams; all the royal children’re on hand to wave and mingle with subjects. They’re not a large kingdom, really just the last hop of an outpost before the chilly sorcerous North; but nobody dares invade a land that shares uneasy borders with magic.  
  
He glances at Sebastian again. Sebastian stands perfectly straight and sweet-faced and calm in blue velvet, more composed in the face of crowds than Chris will ever be. Sebastian should’ve been the Crown Prince. He sighs, shifts weight. His shoes pinch.  
  
Everyone knows Sebastian’s a fairy, but for a fairy he doesn’t do anything much. Finding a lost kitten or two, healing Chris’s little brother’s broken arm, somehow always in the kitchen when blueberry pie exists. Barely magical, really; it’s reassuring that he can get lost in a book or trip over a stairstep like the rest of them, and it’s a good omen, the rumors say, to have a fairy around. Good luck. A blessing, even if he’s practically not a fairy at all; and the village baker, laughing, had thrown a cinnamon roll out to Sebastian from the window as she’d said it. He’d caught it adroitly and grinned.  
  
He’s Chris’s best friend. He has been for almost two decades.  
  
Queen Lisabetta Capuana Christina Evans finishes her ceremonial rewarding of barons, takes off her crown, and says, “All right, now we’re having the party,” and invites all assembled subjects, poor and rich and middle-class, to the feast spread out on the castle’s great lawn.  
  
Sebastian leans in toward him. “Strawberry wine and impromptu musical performances at the tavern?”  
  
“Hell yes,” Chris agrees wholeheartedly. Sebastian likes to sing, a fairy-stereotype truth about which the family teases him mercilessly; but then they all perform, they’re a musical royal horde, so that’s just one more voice in the melodious din. “Just let me change shoes.”  
  
“Already arranged. There’s a spare pair in the closet outside.”  
  
Chris grins. “What would I do without you?”  
  
“You’d be a human disaster,” Sebastian says very seriously, eyes dancing. “You’d—”  
  
“Chris?” His mother’s voice gets their attention immediately. “I do need to talk to you.”  
  
“Of course,” Chris agrees, and makes an apologetic face at Sebastian. “About what?”  
  
“Oh…Sebastian, sweetheart, you can stay.” Lisa smiles up at him—she’s shorter, rounder, and wiser than both of them. She opens the palace’s doors to anyone in need, and Chris can only hope to be half the ruler she is, but he’s in no hurry to take over.

He likes his life, in a vague unexamined way. He likes gradually assuming more responsibility—meetings with the Small Council and the larger Parliament of Lords and Representatives, state visits to the new wing of the University, a few more open court sessions every month. He likes being able to forget the crown and go mingle with potters and off-duty Home Guard and philosophers in pubs, Sebastian in tow like a long-legged wryly amused panther with literary tendencies.  
  
He’s heard approving murmurs about his lack of ceremony and willingness to jump in and play pub drinking games with or sketch swift charcoal portraits of his future subjects. He’s a decent artist, enough so that if he weren’t the Heir he could probably make a moderate living at it; as it is, he takes the odd commission if the requester or topic’s intriguing, and captures family moments in spare evenings, and otherwise gives away stray pencil-scenes to, say, tavern-owners or the mother of the little girl with the fluffy dog he’d done a series of. The kingdom’s small enough that most everyone’ll run into at least one member of the royal family at least once in a lifetime, more for those living in the village clustered in the palace’s rambling stone skirts.  
  
The appreciative murmurers haven’t quite figured out that the Crown Prince in particular prefers being informal because formality’s difficult. He gets sweaty and anxious when all eyes are on him and aggressively deferential.  
  
_And_ his formal audience shoes continue to pinch.  
  
He’s not ready to run the kingdom. Maybe someday—not for a long time, he’s hoping—but not yet. He knows as much. He knows he’s in no hurry at all.  
  
Sebastian, of course, isn’t the Heir. But might as well be; Chris runs drafted speeches and petition-replies by him, and they’re always better for it; Chris draws him when he’s reading and his mouth quirks up at an entertaining line, and Sebastian tolerates multiple studies of elegant fingers and curved lips and artistically interesting features with patient good humor. He lets Chris employ him as a model when needed. He has for years.  
  
“Come into my study, both of you,” Chris’s mother says now, and ushers them ahead, while tipsy tatterdemalion mingling continues on the lawn.  
  
  
Two minutes later, Chris protests loudly, “You want me to what?”  
  
“You’re nearly out of your thirties, and—”  
  
“I’m _thirty-four!”_  
  
“—nearly out of your thirties, and it’s time you went on your Vision Quest.” His mother crosses arms. “You can’t put it off forever.”  
  
“But, Mom,” Chris implores. “I don’t want to.”  
  
“Every Crown Prince or Princess for the last thousand years has gone on a Vision Quest to the Seeing Pool in the Northern—”  
  
“—in the Northern Territories, where they’ve battled fearsome dangers and glimpsed the faces of their respective True Loves,” Chris grumbles. Tradition’s important. He knows. “I just…I don’t know, can’t I…not? Not yet? I mean, I’m happy.”  
  
Sebastian, at his side like a slim strong dark shadow, notes, “You might also be happy with True Love, you know.”  
  
“You’re not helping!”  
  
“Christopher,” his mother says. She’s giving him the patented hopeful maternal gaze. She could inspire martyrs. Summon armies. Conquer the sun. “I don’t want you to be alone.”  
  
“I’m not alone!” He waves an arm vaguely. “I’ve got…y’know, I’ve got Seb! Right, Seb?”  
  
Sebastian makes a small movement, almost infinitesimal, almost a flinch; but in the next eyeblink he’s lazily smiling, head tipped to one side, leaning a shoulder on the closest bookshelf and letting it prop him up, so much so that Chris doubts his own perception of a second before. “Oh, of course. Inarguably.”  
  
“See?” But his mother’s not looking at him. He follows her sightline; she’s looking at Seb. “Mom,” Chris attempts plaintively.  
  
“You know I love you,” Lisa Evans says, a queen and a mother, gazing at her eldest boys. “Both of you, very much.”  
  
“Of course we know,” Chris says, baffled. “Is everything okay?”  
  
“Of course we know,” Sebastian says after him, more softly and more heartfelt than Chris is expecting. He’s got a feeling there’s something else he doesn’t hear being said, but they aren’t saying it to him.  
  
“And, Chris, everything’s fine,” his mother adds, tone the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head. “It’s time, that’s all. You’ll leave next week. I’ve made arrangements for your brother to handle your administrative duties here.”  
  
“I’m coming with you,” Sebastian says. No: not says. States. Fact.  
  
“Well, sure,” Chris sighs, “I guess we’re going North,” and resigns himself to finding True Love.  
  
  
Preparations hardly take any time; the kingdom’s excited for him. A Crown Prince, and a Vision Quest—at last, jokes the Keeper of the Armory, and Chris rolls eyes and accepts a sword—and a Happily Ever After. Ballads are sung. Women and men coo happily over romance. Firelight crackles in hearth-fires. Chris’s married sisters send messages telling him it’s his turn and rather smugly reminding him that they didn’t have to go on quests to prove _their_ worth, neither of them being the Heir.  
  
Some Heirs, every once in a great while, find neither a Prince nor a Princess in the Seeing Pool, instead achieving a Happily Ever After with only themselves. Chris, running through available aristocratic children of the bordering Southern kingdoms, concludes that this may well be his own case. Prince Robert and Prince Mark are married, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Aaron are too young, and he’s a hundred percent certain that Prince Anthony’s not interested in men, which wouldn’t necessarily preclude True Love but would make wedding-night consummation difficult. He’s flexible as far as gender—he’s always fallen for the person, not the physical attributes—but even so he can’t come up with any single eligible person of appropriate rank.  
  
He runs his list by Sebastian in case he’s forgotten someone. Sebastian observes, “You’ve forgotten Princess Scarlett, but she’s not eligible; you’re some sort of distant cousin, I believe.”  
  
“Oh. Right.” He sighs melodramatically. Sprawls across the library divan. “I’m going to end this Quest alone with myself. Just me, forever.”  
  
Sebastian, who’d been already occupying the divan, moves legs to let Chris overact, and then plops them atop Chris’s own. There’s nothing unusual about this. “Terribly alone. Yes. I plainly am worth less than your furniture in this scenario.”  
  
“Oh, you…” He waves a hand. “Of course you’re there. You don’t count.”  
  
“Ah,” Sebastian says, picking up his astronomical text again. “Thank you for clarifying.”  
  
Chris pokes him with a toe, which requires some flexibility, though Seb doesn’t seem impressed. “You know what I mean.”  
  
“Actually I don’t.” Seb’s tone’s oddly defensive; Chris frowns, confused, but in the next second Sebastian sighs and shakes his head. “Never mind. Look, there’s no point to you worrying about it now. The Pool’ll show you whatever it shows you; we’ll find out what that is when we get there. For all we know there’s a long-lost Prince or Princess right under our noses, someone we’ve both forgotten, and your task’ll be to find him or her. Does that help?”  
  
“Um. Yeah?” He feels as if he ought to say more, but he doesn’t know what else belongs in that reply. Sebastian’s back behind scientific pages and buried in star-descriptions, and the silence stretches out enough to go from normal to prickly to unremarked.  
  
It _does_ help. He can set aside that worry for now. It’ll come back later, but Seb’s right and the vision’s not predictable in advance; no point in racking his brain.  
  
As the pause extends, he figures out that Sebastian’s not going to say anything more either; he gets up after a minute and gets his own book, an account of solitary explorer’s travels through the Northern Territories, but restlessness scratches under his skin like a task left undone when he glances at Seb’s bent head, and he doesn’t know why.  
  
  
Sebastian gets noticeably quiet the night before they’re due to depart. Thinking back, Chris realizes that he’s been quieter than usual for a while; a few days, anyway. Not humming absentmindedly under his breath. Not jumping in to make fun of the younger Prince Evans across a breakfast table when Scott fell extravagantly and fleetingly in love with yet another theatre actor.  
  
“Seb?”  
  
“Hmm?” Sebastian’s studying a map, eyes intent. The library’s quiet around them. At least Chris thinks he’s studying the map; he might be trying to scorch a hole through parchment with his eyes. “I’ve packed your heavier traveling coat, if you’re looking for it. And three different antidotes to various poisons; the dangers of the Vision Quest change for each person. You may as well be ready.”  
  
“Stop,” Chris says, and puts a hand on the map. “We are every kind of ready. We couldn’t be more ready. It’s a tradition every Heir follows, I’m prepared—” He flexes a bicep, knowing the ridiculousness’ll earn a reluctant smile. “—and you can take out anything with those knives, I’ve seen you. Come up to the astronomy tower with me.”  
  
Sebastian laughs. It’s not really an astronomy tower. It’s the tallest and windiest tower in the palace, an old guard signal station; at the ages of eighteen and sixteen respectively they’d wheedled one of the newfangled experimental telescopes out of the University masters and spent nights speculating about far-off stars.  
  
“I brought beer,” he adds. “Brewed with cocoa nibs.”  
  
“In that case, lead on.” Sebastian falls into step beside him, going up. They don’t speak much on the way, companionably so; they don’t need to. At the top, through slitted windows, stars twinkle cold and clear.  
  
Chris hands him the beer—it’s a large earthen jug—and sits down on the frost-bitten window-ledge, night at his back. “Okay, you want to tell me?”  
  
“Do I want to tell you what?” Sebastian takes a drink, takes the chair by the telescope: a big battered ripped-velvet scarlet beast that’d once happily held them both. He tucks one infinite leg under himself and hands the jug back. His eyes stay in shadow.  
  
“Seriously?”  
  
“It’s not…” Sebastian shrugs, accepts another drink. “Not something you need to worry about.”  
  
“You tell me everything,” Chris says. “I tell you everything. I told you when I was desperately in love with Lady Atwell that whole year, remember? It’s me, you can say anything.”  
  
“I remember you constantly wearing that awful red and white and blue riding outfit because she told you she liked it one time,” Sebastian says, and if there’s an emotion other than amusement in his voice Chris can’t pinpoint it. “Chris, it’s nothing you can do anything about, and I don’t want to distract you. It’s your Quest.”  
  
“I’m distracted right now. And you’re not talking.” He gets up, comes over to the chair, flops inelegantly down on the dusty tower floor by fairy feet. From here he can look up, an odd sort of role-reversal for a Crown Prince and a companion, at those winter-pale eyes. “Don’t make me talk to myself, it’ll be a boring Vision Quest if I have to, come on.”  
  
Sebastian’s silent for a minute, but it’s a loud silence; Chris has the impression that he’s trying to decide, turning possibilities over.  
  
He tacks on, because he’s never been good at letting things go, “You can’t say _anything_ that’ll make me stop being your friend, you know that, right?”  
  
And Sebastian reaches down, plucks the beer out of his hand, and finishes off half of it. Then answers, “I know.”  
  
“So…”  
  
“So it’s just that we’re heading North.” Sebastian gets up, holds out a hand. “Stop sitting on the ground. We’re heading back toward Fairyland, and that’s all it is. Magic. More of it. And not nice. It’s just that, and I meant it about getting you off the ground, it’s cold.”  
  
Oh. That makes sense. Sebastian’s magic-sensitive; he’s not bothered by good-hearted kindly-meant white-witch attempts at curing cattle, but he’d had nightmares for a week when the peddler with sadistic tendencies and a minor gift for love-spells had come to the closest village. He’d been the reason they’d figured that one out.  
  
“Oh,” Chris says, understanding, thinking he understands. “Do you want to…would you rather not come?”  
  
“I’m your fairy _companion_ ,” Sebastian points out with withering sarcasm. “I _accompany_ you.”  
  
“Yeah, but if you’re—”  
  
“Shut up, Chris.”  
  
“Ow, hey,” Chris protests, “I was trying to be nice.”  
  
Sebastian looks at him across the moonlit tower. Their telescope, older and outdated now, yearns voicelessly for the sky. It’s framed by the space between them. “I didn’t mean that.”  
  
“I know. You’re too sweet for that.” He’d used the word once to describe his fairy for a printed broadside news sheet, six years ago; Sebastian’s never let him live that one down.  
  
“I’m not really,” Sebastian says, low enough to be only for himself. Chris hears him because the tower’s quiet, but says, “What?” anyway.  
  
Sebastian says, “I’m coming with you because otherwise you’ll forget your own underclothes,” and Chris agrees that this is probably true, and goes with him downstairs to lamplight and family and early bed so they can ride out in the morning.  
  
His room’s next to Sebastian’s, spiraling off the same branch of the East Tower; his mother’d distributed them by age. They don’t have a connecting door but might’ve used one, as often as they end up in each other’s space, sharing books. Sebastian closes his first tonight, without looking back. Chris kicks his own shut and kicks off boots and then stops, left boot stuck on his toe.  
  
Sebastian’s magic-sensitive, yes. Sebastian might’ve even been embarrassed to admit a potential liability.  
  
But that’s not anything Chris doesn’t already know. It might even be useful: awareness of upcoming danger. Either way strategic sense would dictate that Sebastian _would_ tell him, liability or asset.  
  
So why the quietness?  
  
So why the omission?  
  
He won’t call it a lie—Sebastian’s never, not in nineteen years of growing up entwined with each other, lied to him. Small polite stretching-of-truth, maybe; Chris is certain that yes he does look terrified as hell before every royal address he’s expected to give, no matter what blue eyes tell him. But nothing important.  
  
Nothing potentially life-affecting.  
  
Maybe Sebastian’s scared, he thinks, successfully kicking off the boot. He hates the idea that Seb would keep that from him, hates it with a virulence that astounds him as it twists in his gut; but he does understand. If Seb doesn’t know precisely how proximity to wild magic’ll affect him, of course he’d be scared, and Chris knows about the insidious irrational claws of anxiety.  
  
He’ll just have to be there for Sebastian, he concludes, falling into bed. Not like that’s a hardship. Not like they’ve not been each other’s shoulders their whole lives. He’ll just have to be more subtle about it if Seb’s embarrassed to admit to being afraid.  
  
Solution reached, he closes his eyes, and resolves to be as nice as he can to Sebastian in the morning, and every day of the stupid traditional quest thereafter.  
  
  
The first day’s uneventful. They ride North, but they ride through fields they know, villages where people recognize Chris and Chris’s fairy-shadow and beckon them in for a meal or a cup of tea. They help a widower fix a fence. Chris jams a stake into ground, triumphant, and looks up to see Sebastian calmly walking out of the forest with all six missing pigs docilely trotting behind him. He makes a few jokes, but only the amount any reasonable person would, because he’s being nice. Sebastian rolls those expressive eyes.  
  
Of course Sebastian can find lost pigs. Sebastian can do anything; Chris entirely believes that.  
  
An old question sidles up, as he watches his fairy scratch a sow under the chin with no thought given to any incongruity of elegant fingers and bristly hair. It’s a question that nobody’s ever outright asked, but the subject of vast speculation in taverns and below palace stairs. No one’ll put it to Sebastian, of course.  
  
In every single legend, fairies who come across the border have some sort of purpose. Some form of motive. Light or dark, mischief or protection: always a reason. A few wicked sorcerers in old tales claimed to be able to summon and bind fairies to their will, but those stories tended to end bloodily and badly; in any case no one’s ever claimed responsibility for Sebastian being here.  
  
Nobody’ll ask Sebastian because, in the first place, it’s rude: one should treat fairies with good manners. In the second place…  
  
In the second place it’s not only rude but conceivably dangerous, if the fairy’s offended, if the fairy’s under a spell or a geas not to speak of it, if consequences arise.  
  
They’d guessed he had to be some sort of fairy royalty from the inhuman fineness of his clothes and the Court polish of his politeness; not precisely the same as their own customs, but Sebastian clearly knew about orders of precedence and formal versus informal audiences and the proper term of address for a viscount’s second daughter. Queen Lisa had simply adopted him as yet another welcome addition to the royal brood, not one in the line of succession but only twelve years old and in need of chocolate biscuits. He’d spent the most time with both Chris and Scott at first, another brother underfoot. Somehow gradually he’d spent _more_ time with Chris, permanently right there when Chris needed a hand in the weapons training yard or a sounding board before public speeches or a partner in tavern-related mischief; and over the years he’s become Chris’s confidant and dark-haired capable companion and slender muscular occasionally sarcastic book-loving other half.  
  
Sebastian continues petting the pig, simultaneously listening with apparently honest interest to the farmer’s story about the time the village cows ate strange indigo grasses after a wind out of the North. The cows had supposedly given blue milk for a month; the punchline of what’s almost certainly a tall tale is, “…and they still do, once in a blue moon.”  
  
Sebastian laughs. The farmer looks as if he’s just realized that he’s told this story to a fairy and is trying to work out whether he should be nervous or proud. Sebastian says solemnly, “Only once in a blue moon? If they ate moon-grass, you should be getting at least twice that amount of blue milk, or so I’ve heard,” and now the man looks as if he’s trying to work out whether or not this is serious, at least until Sebastian grins, and then he guffaws.  
  
The closest Sebastian’s ever come to revealing his reasons had been the night of his twenty-first birthday, which they’d celebrated by hosting an all-night party in Seb’s favorite tavern. Sebastian can outdrink just about anyone, courtesy of fairy blood or maybe only fortunate inheritance, but neither of them’d been sober by the time they’d stumbled home. Sebastian’d said, leaning on Chris’s shoulder in his bedroom doorway, obviously continuing a line of conversation only existing in his head, “Sometimes I think it won’t be that hard, when it’s for you…”  
  
“What won’t?” Chris’d asked, struggling to balance tipsy fairy-muscles and his own sloshing brain and uncoordinated toes. “Hey, d’you mind if I just pass out on your bed too?”  
  
“I never do, do I…?” They’d fallen heavily onto the mattress; Chris, vaguely recalling that it was Seb’s birthday, had managed to tug his fairy-companion’s boots off, though not his own. Sebastian mumbled words that sounded like thanks, and then something else that sounded like, “I’m going to die because of you, that’s what.”  
  
“I didn’t make you drink the scary purple mead,” Chris’d yawned, “you did that on your own,” and tumbled into sleep fully dressed.  
  
He’s thought about that first sentence—the unusually revealing one, not the obvious attempt to blame the hangover of death on Chris—on and off, ever since. It won’t be hard? What won’t be?  
  
They’ve all taken guesses in secret. Chris, his siblings, even his mother. Wondering about their adopted fairy-brother. Coming up with ever more outlandish theories. Making it a game, though that’d been over a decade ago.  
  
Glancing at Sebastian—his best friend, the man who’s come along on Chris’s Vision Quest despite unspoken personal concerns over magical distress—as they swing back into the saddle, he feels ashamed. He feels guilty.  
  
He wants to apologize, but he doesn’t know how. After a few more hours of riding he forgets to keep coming up with ways to try. Distracted by pondering the present and the reason they’re here.  
  
Thinking about it as they camp under the big expansive glitter of stars, he muses, “So I guess this is how True Love works, then? I see the person, whoever it is, I ride to their rescue, save them from whatever last Deadly Peril it is, big romantic grand gesture…I mean, that’s what you _do_ for someone you love, right? Completely sort of blow them away with the romance? And they fall into your arms?”  
  
“I suppose,” Sebastian says. “Does only metaphorical falling need to be involved, or should we find you a convenient tree root to trip on?”  
  
“You’ve never been in love,” Chris retorts as loftily as he can manage. “Not like that, anyway. Where you just catch a glimpse of the person—eyes meeting across a crowded room—”  
  
“—or in a magical Seeing Pool—”  
  
“—thank you, shut up, Seb—or seeing even the back of their head, the movement of a hand, and you just _know_ , y’know, like fireworks, even if you’ve never talked to them before. That doesn’t matter. Whether you’ve even met them. It’s all sort of champagne and sparkles. At first sight.”  
  
Sebastian’s quiet for a second; Chris wonders why, wonders whether Seb’s ever in fact had feelings for anyone here in this human land, but—he’d know, Sebastian would’ve told him, they share everything.  
  
Don’t they?  
  
“No,” Sebastian says finally. “I’ve never been in love like that.”  
  
“Right,” Chris declares, which should prove his point, except—  
  
He glances at his best friend in the whole world again. Something’s off. Something’s not…well, not right. Nothing he can put a finger on. “You okay?”  
  
“Fine.” Sebastian sets down his book. Of course he’d brought a book, a travel-sized dense compilation of exotic romances. “It’s…it’s the North. That’s all. It’s a fairy-place, of course. One that ended up on your side of the border. It’s just my head. Like an itch, but inside. Prickly.”  
  
This is almost certainly true; Sebastian’s never lied to him, he thinks again. He has the sense that there’s more, though. Maybe Sebastian’s not feeling well. Maybe the magic itchiness is worse than he’s letting on. That’d be like Seb. “Hey,” he says. “You know I’m here, right? Whatever you need.”  
  
And Sebastian does smile. It’s a genuine smile, no trace of…whatever that’d been. Before. “I know.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a Quest, and consequences.

The landscape becomes rockier. Drier. More grey. Hills sprout stone boulders and crags. Temperatures fall; plants take on iridescent hues, shimmering white and turquoise and primrose. Magic in the air.  
  
They won’t go as far as the border. That air becomes difficult for humans to survive in, at least not without being changed. Like the plants, Chris thinks, glancing at a particularly verdant clump of unnaturally sparkly sage. Fairyland protecting itself. Sebastian can breathe fine in the human kingdoms; this is not exactly fair.  
  
The Seeing Pool tends to move around, though it stays on the human side of the dividing line, and it also likes to protect itself. The Vision Quest, while traditional, _is_ a true quest; Chris could be injured or maimed, and in a rare few cases Crown Princes or Princesses _have_ died, so it’s a proper test of wits and strength and commitment, the idea being that this is good for an Heir. The first of the hazards this time around proves to be the invisible barrier that refuses to permit horses through; people seem to be allowed, both human and fairy, but not animals.  
  
“So we can’t carry as much,” Chris summarizes. “Take what’s most essential, I guess. Any idea how far we are?”  
  
“Specifically, no. That’s impossible. But…” Sebastian shakes dark hair out of his eyes; it’s coming loose from its knot at the nape of his neck. Like Chris, he’s dressed for chilly weather; unlike Chris, he’s got an extra coat and a scarf, because he tends to feel the cold more to begin with. “No past Quests’ve gone further than _here_ —that’s the blue dot—and I do know where we are; that’s this ridge. It shouldn’t be too bad on foot.”  
  
“I trust you,” Chris says. “What do we do about the horses?”  
  
“I’ll send them home,” Sebastian says absently. “I might be able to help, if it’s not some sort of unfair advantage. The headache’s a bit worse if I think about going northwest, which likely means more magical defenses.”  
  
“You’re allowed to help.” Fairy-companions can do whatever they want; might turn out to be why they’ve come. “But don’t if it’s going to hurt.”  
  
Sebastian folds up the map. Both he and the parchment give Chris a long-suffering sardonic look. “I can’t exactly turn it off. We may as well use it.”  
  
“I don’t like it,” Chris grumbles, and makes sure the medical supplies end up in his pack. Sebastian breathes a word or two into attentive horse-ears; their mounts head merrily and safely South without them.  
  
They walk northwest, through narrowing stone-slab canyons and tufts of sparse wild grass. They walk cautiously.  
  
  
The second hazard turns out to be acid quicksand: deceptive tiny pockets that look like regular swampland until boots start dissolving, and shortly thereafter flesh.  
  
Chris does know what acid sand looks like, but he’s preoccupied—thinking about Sebastian and the evident throbbing headache and what he can do to help—and this leads to a very bad misstep.  
  
“Sit down,” Sebastian says sharply, not panicked yet, and shoves him onto a log. Chris’s feet feel hot but not on fire, not quite; the sand’s working away at his boots. He’s got a few seconds.  
  
Sebastian yanks off Chris’s left boot bare-handed. Chris _does_ panic, then. “You’ll _die_ —that shit eats right through—”  
  
“I’m a fairy, idiot.” Chris’s right boot goes flying. “Hardly anything to worry about.”  
  
Chris—who does have spare boots and socks in his pack; he _did_ come prepared—bolts to bare feet, safely on grass. Grabs Sebastian’s arm.  
  
Sebastian’s skin’s not being eaten away to bone, no—but long musician’s fingers’re blistering already, discolored by what look like massive burns. They shake slightly; Chris stares, horrified. “You—don’t fucking move, stay still, I’ve got the medical supplies, we have burn ointment—why would you—what the _hell_ , Seb—”  
  
“It’ll heal,” Sebastian says. It already is: blisters beginning to shrink, red marginally less angry. “Don’t worry. And you still have feet.”  
  
“You’re hurt.”  
  
“One of us can recover,” Sebastian says, exquisitely dry, “and one of us is human. It seemed the fastest way to get your boots off. Would you like spare socks?”  
  
“I have fucking spare socks,” Chris grumbles, and insists on winding bandages and burn ointment around his fingers anyway. Sebastian looks away while he does it. Chris doesn’t know what that means. Chris wonders how many times Sebastian’s saved his life—literally and metaphorically, every time the Crown Prince got drunk in a tavern or started hyperventilating before a public audience, soothed by the touch of one of those hands—over the years.  
  
Chris wonders how many more times he’s got, before Sebastian walks back into magic and leaves him behind.  
  
He can’t imagine a life without Sebastian in it. Marriage to an unknown Prince or Princess, a promised Happily Ever After, ruling a kingdom? Without those pale happy eyes? Without those generous hands?  
  
“Thank you,” Sebastian says, yanking him back into the present and out of the melancholy future. “We should bear west a bit more. It’ll only be an hour or so.”  
  
“How do you—oh, never mind, of course you know.” He releases that hand reluctantly. Sebastian says nothing, but curls fingers very slightly inward, as if checking bandages. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s, um, go.”  
  
And he walks next to his best friend, and he wishes—not for the first time, but the most ferociously—that he did not have to go and seek a One True Love in a Seeing Pool. That he could turn around and never rescue a prince or princess he’s never met. That he could…  
  
What? Not fulfill his obligations? Defy thousands of years of tradition?  
  
He wants to touch Sebastian again. He wants to check those bandages. Just in case. Healing, sure, but maybe not fast enough. He wants to know.  
  
Sebastian’s face is turned away, looking ahead at their path. Chris sighs inwardly, tries to stop thinking anything at all, and plods along over rock and sand at his side.  
  
  
The final hazard’s a dragon.  
  
Chris, flattened against a canyon wall, hisses, “Did _you_ expect this?”  
  
“No!” Sebastian peeks around rock again. “That’s new. Not in any of my books.”  
  
“I thought they were extinct!”  
  
“Not at all. They don’t come across the border, though. They live on magic. Oh—of course, this is your Seeing Pool, it’s entirely magic…I wonder if it drinks from the Pool itself, or—”  
  
“You can practice comparative magical zoology later!” He risks one more glance. The Pool itself is visible beyond the not insignificant obstacle of dragon. It’s a natural spring, welling up into a bowl shaped of smoky transparent stone, carved over eons by the drip of Fairyland-sourced water. It shimmers under the slate-and-cloud sky at the end of the skinny rock-walled trail. It’s only a few steps, but: dragon.  
  
Not a cuddly faithful tamable beast as in some children’s puppet shows. Not huge, about the size of a big cart-horse, but absolutely not small as a house-pet lizard. Ugly. Black-scaled, spiky, fanged. Ochre glow down near its belly. Built to be a predator and bring death. It lashes its tail like a vicious cat, waiting. It knows they’re here.  
  
Sebastian gives him a mildly affronted glare. “If anything I’d be a writer of enchanted romance, and it’s research—”  
  
“I _know_ , Seb!”  
  
“Give me your sword, then.”  
  
Chris passes it over, no questions asked. It’s a good sword; no fancy name or lineage, just plain strong steel and solid craftsmanship.  
  
Sebastian closes a hand around the blade. Chris almost interrupts right then, but no blood appears; he keeps an eye on Seb’s fingers, though. He’s grown up with legends about magic and the cost thereof.  
  
Sebastian murmurs low words and strokes his hand along bare steel, a disarmingly intimate gesture. Chris might be imagining the way the sword thrills to his caress, a ripple passing along the surface. Might be.  
  
He has a flash of astonished wondering: is this how Sebastian would touch someone he loved? With strength, with coaxing, with unhurried erotic fingers and palm?  
  
He swallows. He tries not to think about whether magic’s always like this for Sebastian: a slow sweet seduction, a pulse-beat, a swell of desire.  
  
Everyone knows the Crown Prince’s loyal companion is a fairy. Chris has never seen his best friend _as_ a fairy before.  
  
Sebastian blinks, shakes himself, comes back from whatever dreamy precipice he’d been on. “Here.”  
  
“Was it good for you,” Chris jokes, but he’s strangely uneasy. Sebastian’s hand stroking his sword, Sebastian beautiful and inhuman and wrapped in invisible sorcery. The joke lands badly.  
  
“I put myself into it,” Sebastian says flatly. “My own magic. It should work.”  
  
“You could use it. Um. If it’s…yours?”  
  
“You’re better with a sword than I am, and it’s your Quest.” Sebastian shoves the sword into his hand and pulls both long knives instead. “I don’t _know_ if it’ll work. I’ll be your distraction. Just try to cut its head off; there’s no such thing as a mythical vulnerable spot. Ready?”  
  
“No,” Chris says. “Are you okay? I mean…I don’t know. Are you?”  
  
And Sebastian’s eyes get less guarded, more affectionate, more familiar. “I’m fine.”  
  
They run into battle—for the first time ever—together. The world becomes a crazy collision of black scales and lunges and scorching fire. Chris has trained with a sword, but never against a horse-sized heap of fangs and claws and spiked tail; he ducks, dodges, feels the sting of a tail-barb scrape one leg. A flicker of blue flows past him: Sebastian, he realizes belatedly, turning rock-dust into sparkling motes of magic, calling a Fairyland-beast to him.  
  
He stumbles on a rock; the dragon’s head swings his way and snarls. Fire bubbles up: not ready yet but building. Sebastian throws a knife instead of magic this time. It whirls back to face him.  
  
Chris dives in and tries to do what his fairy said, really tries, and the sword slides through scales like butter, but the dragon’s quick when it’s hurt and it pulls back and teeth clash above Sebastian’s head—  
  
Chris just gives up and stabs it through where he hopes the heart is. The malevolence collapses in a clatter of scale and bone, and ceases to move. He sags, exhausted.  
  
“Hmm,” Sebastian observes, coming over to his side. There’s a fresh scratch along one graceful cheekbone: not a claw, but flying shards of rock slicing skin. “That shouldn’t’ve worked.”  
  
“Guess you’re just that good.”  
  
“I meant—” Seb stops, shrugs, smiles. He looks abruptly tired, though Chris can’t spot any other wounds. “Let me wrap up your leg, and then you can go peer into your enchanted water.”  
  
“I didn’t know you could do shit like that,” Chris says while skilled fingers bandage his cut. It’s not bad, only a slash across the meat of his left calf. “Sparks and swords and everything.”  
  
“When have you ever needed a magical sword before now?” Sebastian asks, which isn’t an answer. “Can you walk on it?”  
  
“Oh, yeah, it’s fine, it’s barely even anything, thanks.” He gets up to prove it, and holds out a hand. Sebastian, who’d been sitting on the ground to examine his leg, takes it.  
  
Nothing changes, not outwardly. He’s grabbed Seb’s hand countless times before.  
  
He just somehow never noticed the strength of those fingers. The way they fit into his without hesitation, nothing held back.  
  
“Quest,” Sebastian says, letting go. Rock-dust lingers in his hair, lightening dark silk to silver. “Why we’re here.”  
  
“Oh…right.” He’d forgotten.  
  
He leaves the sword. He doesn’t want to, but it seems to be stuck in the dragon, and Sebastian says it’s not enchanted anymore anyway. He walks past the scaled body and up to the crystalline mirror of the Seeing Pool in its opalescent bowl.  
  
He looks into gleaming shallow waters. That’s why he’s here. He’s defeated the Perils. He’s ready to meet his destined other half, whom he’ll go and save from one last Peril and marry in triumph.  
  
He sees Sebastian.  
  
He regards this face—unfairly long eyelashes, dimpled chin, strong jawline, dark hair, the profile he knows better than his own—for a minute.  
  
“Oh,” Sebastian says, behind his shoulder. “It’s me.”  
  
_“Huh?”_  
  
“I mean I’m fucking it up for you. Magical interference. Sorry.” He vanishes so quickly that Chris wonders whether that expression’s not figurative, but when he glances back Sebastian’s sitting on a rocky outcropping a few meters away and studiously pretending to clean a knife.  
  
Hmm. Well, Sebastian _is_ a fairy; presumably magic knows magic. And Sebastian _doesn’t_ lie to him.  
  
Something nameless and wistful pokes at his chest. He peeks back at the Seeing Pool, which should be showing him the person he’s meant to save and treasure. Waters lap upward; shapes form, hazy at first, then blurring into a recognizable setting.  
  
The setting’s the royal library; he knows that much, and he likes the idea that this is his future, cozy and book-paneled and happy at the heart of his kingdom. That’s got to be a good foreshadowing. He hovers closer as a figure strolls into view, wanders over to a shelf, plucks a book down, smiles.  
  
Chris _knows_ that figure. Slightly longer hair, broader shoulders, obviously a few years older. But he knows that wide unfurling pirate’s smile, that head-tilt at a book-friend.  
  
Okay. Of _course_ Sebastian’s in his future.  He wants Sebastian in his future. That’s reassuring; however this quest plays out, whomever he ends up with, Sebastian’ll always be at his side. In his library; and he has to grin. That’s the life he _does_ want. Yes.  
  
He wonders when the unknown Prince or Princess’ll be revealed. He stares into the water. He’s prepared.  
  
Someone enters the library, in the vision. Sebastian turns, lights up, laughs at whatever the person’s saying. Taller than him, albeit only by an inch or so, and also male, at least based on clothing and shoulders and gait; clearly someone he knows well, from the sparkle in those eyes. Chris can’t quite _see_.  
  
The scene shifts, as if he’s not getting it, as if he needs some hand-holding. No longer the future: the past, he understands, as Sebastian’s hair and clothing alter. Still in the library—naturally—but this is a moment Chris knows: roughly two years ago, the first day of the annual spring festival. Sebastian’s reading now, curled up in an enormous royal-purple chair and absorbed in a story. Which means that at any second—  
  
Chris—the memory-Chris—bounces into the scene. Chris, observing, can’t hear his own voice, but no need: the day comes flooding back in a rush. Memory-him lunges over the back of the chair and ruffles Sebastian’s hair; Sebastian jumps, drops the book, glares like an insulted kitten. _Hey,_ Chris says, _come on, spring fair’s today, Robin Hood plays, festival dancers, ale, acrobats, it’ll be fun, let’s go!_  
  
Sebastian sits up, the way he always does when Chris proposes some harebrained excursion. Chris, watching, can hear him saying _yes, fine, why not, you had me at Robin Hood plays,_ and starting to grin.  
  
Memory-Chris bends down to pick up Sebastian’s fallen book, handing it back with an apology and a joke: _some fairy you are, can’t even sense a clumsy human coming?_  
  
_I was reading,_ Sebastian says with a smile, _and I’m too used to you to notice. Go on, I’ll put this back and be right there._  
  
_Okay!_ Memory-Chris bounds out the door. Endless enthusiasm. Ale-drinking and spring festival merriment ahead.  
  
Chris’s own memory, of course, goes with him. But not here. Here the Seeing Pool lingers on Sebastian: on the way he touches the cover of that book, the spot where Chris’s fingers rested when handing it back. Sebastian gazes toward the door, and smiles again: a quiet fond smile, one that Chris has never before seen.  
  
The vision goes black.  
  
The world goes red.  
  
Sebastian’s shouting words in a language that Chris doesn’t know, and the great onyx lump of the dragon’s moving, opening jaws, not quite dead because Sebastian told him to cut off its head and he didn’t _listen_ , and the fire’s roaring up in one last awful burst—  
  
Chris’s fingers scramble for his sword, which isn’t there, having been ineffectually left in a dragon’s heart—  
  
Sebastian pushes him aside. Chris falls into the Seeing Pool, which splashes. Shards of broken vision fall around him like scorched snow.  
  
The dragon breathes fire and ash. Chris, paralyzed, can’t move, can’t even think.  
  
Sebastian steps in front of him. Magic flickers up into a shield: insubstantial, brave, foolhardy bright blue. Showers of sparks against ancient dragon-flame.  
  
Sebastian, who’s never done much magic—never in all the years he’s lived with them, never until now—doesn’t have a chance.  
  
Chris, shoved out of the way, unarmed, hears someone screaming. Not the person standing in flame. Himself.  
  
Sebastian only carries knives. He mutters one or two words, even as his last heroic shield-sparks go out. As they die. As his hair, his skin—  
  
Sebastian throws a knife. Unerring aim: into the dragon’s throat, into burgeoning eruptions. The world implodes. White-hot ribbons in the sky, burning blue tongues. Slithering scales and crashing rumbles of collapsing ground—  
  
And then silence, and dark.  
  
Chris wakes up hours or years later. He’s wet and cold and uncomfortable; he feels like he’s lying in a puddle on rocks.  
  
He opens both eyes, agonizingly, to discover that he is in fact lying in a puddle on rocks.  
  
The rocks arch up in voiceless agonized molten shapes, smoothed and seared by dragon’s fire. The shape of wings lingers, flash-burned onto stone above a small heap of black ash. The sky’s dull flat iron overhead. The Seeing Pool’s dead; when Chris sits up, he realizes he’s been unconscious in it, or rather in what remains, water splashed out across the ground and onto rocks like blood, only a few drops pooling at the bottom of the basin.  
  
He’s not on fire but he is stiff and sore everyplace, not a surprise, and if he’s feeling this bad then Sebastian must be worse, having pushed him out of the way and dispatched a dragon singlehandedly; so he looks around and says, “Seb?”  
  
His voice echoes back from canyon walls and empty stone.  
  
“Sebastian?”  
  
No reply.  
  
“Sebastian,” Chris says, “this isn’t funny, tell me where you are, if you’re hurt, if you can’t come to me I’ll come find you, just say something, please.”  
  
Chris says, “Seb, please.”  
  
Chris gets to his feet, limping and wincing, and says, “If you still have spare socks can I have them?” because Sebastian will always come when Chris needs him, Sebastian always does, that’s—  
  
The dragon’s gone, but the heap of black ash stirs, coaxed by wind.  
  
Chris takes a step that way.  
  
Sebastian’s knife—the slim twisted sliver of enchanted metal that’s no longer a knife, barely even a hairpin—glimmers dull silver under dark dust.  
  
Chris picks it up. Little flecks of ash cling to the metal, to his fingers, until the wind takes them away.  
  
Chris says, “Sebastian…?”  
  
After a minute he sits down, very slowly, back against the sheer rock wall.  
  
He does not move. He holds Sebastian’s knife in his lap. He’s not seeing anything.  
  
The sun goes away and comes back again.  
  
The Seeing Pool does not refill. Chris’s pack sits abandoned beside the rock basin. The pack has food and medicine. It’s useless.  
  
The sun goes away, and comes back. Again.  
  
He feels hands on his shoulder. On his face. Checking him for injuries. Shaking him. “Chris?”  
  
“He’s dead,” Chris says.  
  
“I know.” Scott crouches down in front of him. His younger brother’s face is older: etched with fear, with a hard three days ride, with shaken love. “Chris. Look at me.”  
  
“But,” Chris explains, “he’s dead. Sebastian.” It’s important that someone knows this. That Scott knows. That Scott understands: this is why Chris can’t move, can’t look up, can’t even blink, because if he moves that means he’s moving on and he’s leaving Sebastian here to—  
  
To be dead without him—  
  
“I know.” Scott’s eyes’re red-rimmed, and his face is pale. “We saw the end of it. Mom’s scrying mirror. She never could get the damn thing to work, and then she could, just then, like mag—well. We saw. But we’re not going to lose you too, so get up, dammit, Chris, please.”  
  
“I don’t think I can,” Chris says.  
  
“Yes you fucking can,” Scott says, angry and frightened, “you’re the Heir and you—we love you, Chris, please, _please_.”  
  
“He’s dead,” Chris whispers, and starts to cry, and Scott puts arms around him and holds him as he sobs, great wracking shudders that turn him inside out, that he can’t seem to stop, that he thinks will never leave his bones.  
  
  
One side effect of having half-drowned in the Seeing Pool, Chris discovers, is a sort of extra-sensitivity in every sense. Scents become stronger, clearer: he can pick up woodsmoke or perfume from miles away. Touch bespells him; he catches himself running fingers over velvet blankets, samite cloths, dry palace walls, crisp hay. Lights sometimes dazzle and blind; at first he thinks he’s ill, but no, the physician tells him.  
  
“It’s magic. You drank magic.”  
  
“I…”  
  
“Well,” Sam says, “we’ll see how this goes.” Doctor Jackson, having been the family physician for long enough to have delivered multiple royal children, seems unfazed by the Heir suddenly having acquired preternatural perception. “Might be handy. You’ll just have to get used to it.”  
  
“It gives me headaches.”  
  
“Practice,” Sam suggests, and sends him away with willowbark and peppermint tea.  
  
Chris tries. He doesn’t have much control. Sight and sound flare up uninvited; he can hear a conversation halfway across a courtyard as if he’s standing beside the men in question, but not necessarily when he wants to. He sleeps with a pillow over his head.  
  
Sebastian would’ve been able to help him. Sebastian—  
  
He cries more than he’d ever thought possible. His eyes hurt, wrung out with weeping. His heart hurts, empty.  
  
He’s always _had_ Sebastian. He’s always been able to run into a room, nine times out of ten the library, and find Sebastian. He’s not used to rounding corners without his fairy-shadow a step behind him.  
  
He bangs on Sebastian’s door in the morning more than once before he remembers no one’ll grumble and throw a pillow at him. He turns to see what amused blue eyes think of the off-key visiting bard and finds only emptiness.  
  
The third morning he unthinkingly tries to wake Seb up, he does remember, right before knocking knuckles make contact with door-oak. He lets his hand fall. Palm flat against wood. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know how to lose you,” and then he sinks to the floor and rests his head against the door and pretends Sebastian’s on the other side alive, for a moment, only for a moment, and it isn’t enough, and he has to get up and go eat breakfast so his family doesn’t fret over him. More.  
  
He’s not used to grief and the way it rips his bones to pieces and then does it all over again.  
  
“I love him,” he says aloud when his mother finds him in the library sobbing over a gilt-edged copy of the Alexander romances. “I’m—he was—I saw him. I _saw_ him.”  
  
“I know,” she says, and rubs his back the way she had when he’d been young and unable to sleep. “I know.”  
  
“I never told him. I never _knew_.”  
  
“He made his own choices.” Her voice tries to be soothing, but it’s in mourning too. They ache together. “He stayed with us for all those years. He chose to come with you.”  
  
“I failed,” Chris whispers. “I was supposed to save him.”  
  
“I think,” she says, “that perhaps the magic works differently with fairies, sweetheart. Perhaps it’s backwards, and he was meant to save you.”  
  
“But I love him,” Chris says again, face crumpling, he can feel it; and his mother puts arms around him and tells him he’ll be strong, he’ll hurt less, someday.  
  
He overhears—overhears, underhears, he’s not settled on a term—his sisters talking in the hall outside their old bedrooms, that night. They’ve come to visit, assorted husbands and partners and offspring in tow, to be here for him and to mourn Sebastian with the rest of the family; he’d been their adopted sibling as well. Chris appreciates the thought. Sebastian would’ve appreciated the kindness.  
  
_He’ll be all right_ , one of them says, uncertainly. Candlelight dances on her face, highlighting worry. _Won’t he? I mean, he can’t go on like this._  
  
_He’ll be fine. Chris is strong._  
  
_He’s so lonely._  
  
_I wish we could—_  
  
_I know. But…maybe if we think…maybe it’s—not good, but—what future would they have had? Has a Crown Prince EVER married a fairy? And at least Chris is alive._  
  
_He saved Chris,_ murmurs his other sister. _He must have loved him. I wish we could say thank you._  
  
_Perhaps a memorial?_  
  
_Perhaps when Chris is better—_  
  
_Perhaps he’ll want to dedicate the site—_  
  
Chris rolls onto his side, pulls muffling covers over himself, folds himself into a ball. The hearing fades. The pain does not. It never does.  
  
  
He does get used to living with the grief after a month or so. Like walking around with a hole in his chest; as if he’s constantly stooped over by the weight of emptiness. Old, and broken, and never warm enough even in sun.  
  
The palace staff don’t appear to be bothered by his unpracticed random eruptions of magic. They take his answering questions he couldn’t’ve possibly overheard in stride, and learn to cook around his unpredictably too-sensitive taste-buds. They spend a whole week testing creamy soups and soothing stews and various blancmanges. They pity him, a little, though mostly it’s sympathetic sorrow for the Heir and the Heir’s pain. He can hear as much.  
  
They never bake blueberry pies.  
  
He avoids the astronomy tower for two weeks and five days, and then he thinks that Sebastian wouldn’t’ve wanted that, and he goes up alone one night and sits under the stars by the old telescope, the hairpin blunted weight of Sebastian’s melted knife a kindhearted silent presence in his pocket.  
  
His sisters go home after three weeks and a muted memorial service, a reading of the queen’s simple statement of events and a pouring-out of water: there’s no body to bury, the Crown Prince has returned from his Quest but remains shaky and ill with grief and magic, and no one knows what a fairy’d want as a memorial site. His sisters leave with their entourages, not wanting to but needing to attend to their own people, their own lands. They tell him he’s doing fine, and they hug him as if the closeness can make the words be so.  
  
Chris bundles himself up in furs and heavy wool as bitter weather comes in. Sebastian tolerated the cold because he liked wintry fashion, scarves and long coats; Sebastian never liked grey flat days if they came over and over and endlessly. Chris has known this for years, and so has consistently bought in advance one or two dreadful sensational volumes of ghost stories or folklore about kittens or monks chatting with men from other worlds, and has hidden them away to bring out on precisely those days. And Sebastian always—  
  
The latest volume’s squashed between mattresses in his bed. He forgets it’s there until he tastes parchment and feels hardness through said mattresses and eiderdowns one night, courtesy of his shiny new magical senses. When he runs fingertips over the cover, a firebird etched in scarlet and saffron seems to sing; it’s a book of impressively erotic interpretations of fairy legends, and he’s pretty sure someone has sex with the firebird at one point, and he’d thought it’d make his fairy-companion laugh out loud.  
  
He puts the book on his bedside table. He falls asleep with it in sight.  
  
He never learns to sleep better. The dreams always come. He saves Sebastian, or he dies with Sebastian, or he goes back to the Seeing Pool and weeps with joy because Sebastian’s standing there whole and hale and laughing, telling him it was all a dream, making a cheerful face as wind tugs dark hair into pale eyes—  
  
He smiles as he holds court audiences and hears his people’s petitions, in daylight.  
  
One woman brings him a gift, a knitted blanket; the story of this Heir’s journey and loss has already made it to ballads and far-off villages, it seems. More petitioners come, asking him to please look up official land-boundary markers to settle a dispute, to relieve one village of tax debt after a bad harvest, to find a position in the stables for a young orphan whose aunt cannot afford to take him in. More and more of them bring gifts, the kind of homespun heartfelt offerings they’d give to a village friend: canned peaches and fresh-baked bread, a quilt that looks like starry skies, a carved pouncing kitten made of wood, a small iron charm against heartsickness made by one blacksmith who’d always previously denied having a fairy great-grandmother. Chris loves them all, with the patched-up anguish his heart’s become, with all he’s got left; and finds an apprentice groom’s position for the boy, and grants the tax exemption, and sends pages to retrieve the relevant dusty old town charters.  
  
He goes on.  
  
Which is why it’s such a shock—a delirious swooping wondrous shock—when he wakes from another dream of Sebastian’s face, gasping, hearing Sebastian’s voice in his head: _Chris?_


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which True Love and Happy Endings are found.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're done! I hope you've all enjoyed this one--I know I have!

“Sebastian’s alive,” he says to his family, gathered in the library. They blink at him, ruffled, half-awake, half-dressed; he’d gone running through hallways and thumping on doors. They blink at each other as if searching for answers.   
  
“I’m not crazy,” he tells them. “I can hear him.”   
  
His mother’s face gentles with compassion. “Chris, sweetheart…of course you want to hear him. We know you dream about him.”   
  
“This was different,” he explains stubbornly. They can’t see it? Can’t understand? “I hear things now. Magic. And I heard him, he’s alive, we have to go back.”   
  
“To the Pool?” Scott, wearing a hastily-grabbed sheet and an expression of concern, makes a hopeless small gesture. His current lover, the stunningly handsome leading player at the renovated Queen’s Theatre, had—very much to his credit—simply sat up and told him to of _course_ go when a disheveled Crown Prince had hammered on the door in the middle of the night. “You said it was dead. Destroyed. And we looked, Chris, we looked for a—a body, anything to bury, I took the Home Guard out—there’s nothing there. I swear.”   
  
“I know,” Chris agrees. “There wasn’t. Then. But he’ll be there.”   
  
“That doesn’t make any sense!”   
  
“It’s magic!” He flings out arms in exasperation. “It doesn’t have to make sense! Look, if you won’t come I’ll go alone, I’ll leave right now—”   
  
“Chris,” his mother implores. “Stop. _Stop_. We loved him too. Not like you do, but he was our family too. And so are you. Don’t ride North and hunt down dragons. He wouldn’t want you to.”   
  
“I’m not hunting for dragons,” Chris says. “I’m not going to die. I know what I’m doing. I’m going to save him.”   
  
They exchange helpless glances.   
  
Eventually, after more arguing, he wins.   
  
  
He does reluctantly agree to ride out in the morning instead of on the spot, in daylight instead of pitch-black. Scott and Doctor Jackson and a contingent of twenty Home Guard ride with him, armed to take out anything from a fairy squirrel to a whole litter of dragons. He can tell they don’t believe him; they’re humoring his grief.   
  
He doesn’t care. He knows he’s right.   
  
He hadn’t been able to sleep again. He’d tried. He’d wanted to hear Sebastian in his dreams. He thinks that he might hear that voice now in the snowdrop ice of early morning: the faintest of whispers, a water-stain across parchment, a feather-touch of _Chris?_   
  
Sebastian sounds lost. Reaching out in the dark, simply hoping, not able to hear Chris shouting back. Scared and alone.   
  
_ I’m coming for you! _ he yells as loudly as he can. _Hold on, wait for me, please!_   
  
His new senses flare up inconveniently around midday and he can’t see. The world spins, a vertiginous cacophony of saddle-leather and winter bark and crushed grass and dried jerky in someone’s saddlebag and a bizarre metallic bittersweet tang like crushed violets and bronze, and he slides off his horse and stumbles a few steps and vomits into bushes.   
  
He’s aware of Scott’s hand on his back. Of murmurs behind him: _how bad, what sort of omen, stop, go back, go on, is he all right?_   
  
“We’re going on,” Scott snaps. “He asked us to.”   
  
Chris nods feebly. Tries to say thank you.   
  
“Shut up,” Scott says. “I’m not sure you should be here. I’m not sure you should be out of _bed_. Can you ride?” But the hand that gives him a water-flask is supportive.   
  
They ride. They ride as fast as Chris can handle, which is not as fast as he wants to be going. He calls back to Sebastian in his dreams when they’re forced to make camp overnight; Sebastian never hears him, but keeps crying his name.   
  
With the magic of the Seeing Pool dissipated, the terrain behaves itself; with Chris’s extra senses, following that bittersweet taste-scent of violets and bronze, they know which direction to ride. They reach the spot in about two and a half days even with his shakiness. He thinks of Sebastian pointing out a ridge on a map; he thinks of Sebastian’s hands tugging off his boots next to acid sand.   
  
He feels tears burn, though now the burn is mingled loss and hope.   
  
They come around a hill and find the narrow rill of canyon, instantly recognizable crack running into mountain stone. Chris swings himself off his horse and sprints that way. His footfalls ring off high winding walls.   
  
He sees the scorch-marks first, black wings over stone like a monument.    
  
He sees the body lying below that. Where a small heap of ash’d been.   
  
He falls down on both knees at Sebastian’s side.   
  
Sebastian’s naked and unconscious, limp and unmoving but for the rise and fall of his chest. His skin’s very white. His eyes stay closed.   
  
But he’s breathing. He’s alive. He’s _real_.   
  
“Sebastian,” Chris whispers, trembling. “Seb, I’m here, I love you, I heard you, I came back for you, _I love you_ ,” and takes his hand, not knowing what else to do; takes his hand, attempting to fumble warmth into cold skin, and bends over and kisses him on the lips.   
  
Sebastian doesn’t wake. Not a fairytale. Not a childhood puppet-play of heroes and rewards. Chris’s heart, only now realizing the extent of this foolish hope, breaks a little, but not in two, because it can’t, not now, not as long as Sebastian’s breathing.   
  
“Sebastian,” he says again, and then he starts to cry, because Sebastian won’t wake up but is alive, alive.   
  
Scott runs up as he’s cradling that beloved head in his lap, and skids to a halt and catches breath. His eyes are huge. “That’s—Chris, he’s alive!”   
  
“He’s asleep,” Chris says, “of course he is, he must be so tired,” and strokes loose hair out of Sebastian’s face.   
  
“That’s not _possible_.” Scott comes closer, staring, unnerved but overjoyed. “We _looked_ —we looked everywhere around, we thought, you never know with magic—”   
  
“He came back,” Chris says. “He called me.”    
  
  
Sebastian doesn’t awaken.   
  
Sebastian continues to not awaken while Doctor Jackson arrives to check him over, while no outward injuries can be discerned, while they carefully load him onto a litter and head for home. His head rolls across the blanket with each bump in the terrain; he doesn’t react. Chris rides beside him desperately. Chris holds his hand and sits with him when they make camp, and tries talking to him, tries dribbling water into his mouth. Nothing works.   
  
Chris gazes at Sam with stricken eyes. Sam sighs. “I don’t know. He’s not human, y’know.”   
  
“You’ve seen—coma patients, head injuries—people wake up—”   
  
“Yeah, they do, but I’ve never had a patient come back from the dead before!” With spread hands, a futile unsatisfied gesture. “I can tell you he checks out as healthy for him. He’s always run a little cold compared to human people, that’s why all the coats and blankets, but you know that, that’s normal for him. His heart sounds fine, he’s breathing fine, he’s just not awake.”   
  
“What can I do?”   
  
“Honestly, probably this.” Sam rubs at the back of his neck. “Talk to him. Tell him he’s safe and okay to come back. Tell him you’re here. Tell him, I don’t know, astrological trivia, dirty limericks, whatever you two used to talk about. Familiar shit. He might need an anchor. Or he might not even hear you, I’m just guessing here. Keep him warm. Keep him hydrated, though he actually looks like he’s doin’ fine. When we get back and I’ve got hospital equipment I can do some more extensive tests, but not on the road.”   
  
“Okay,” Chris says. He looks at Sebastian’s still face, slack mouth, eyelashes lying immobile over pale skin. “Okay.”   
  
He talks to Sebastian. Anything and everything he can think to say. Keeping in mind the familiar, the known. Observations about stars in the night sky. Ramblings about blueberry pie and how excited the palace cooks’ll be. Promises to read an epic romance story if Seb ever does write one. Elaborate recitations of favorite songs.    
  
In darker moments he knows he’s making no difference. Nothing changes.   
  
In more optimistic moments he knows he doesn’t care. He’ll keep trying forever. If the Seeing Pool was right one final time, then he’s meant to save his True Love from one last Deadly Peril, and he’s damn well not going to let the Peril win.   
  
He tells Sebastian that he can’t keep wearing Chris’s borrowed set of clothes, the ones out of his pack, forever, so he’s going to have to wake up and get dressed once they get home.   
  
His mother’s waiting at the gates when they ride up. Chris keeps hold of Sebastian’s unresponsive hand but falls into her arms.   
  
  
On the third day after they’ve brought him home, Sebastian wakes up.   
  
He wakes up in the late afternoon, sun slanting through infirmary windows in long honey-colored bars. The hospital proper and the University lie just over the hill, but Sam’d concluded that there wasn’t anything they could do that couldn’t be done here. Chris had argued that Sebastian might even be more comfortable in his own bed, but had seen reason in the counterargument for the small but adequate palace infirmary, the one meant for bandaging up Home Guard training bruises and minor kitchen accidents. If Sebastian wakes up hurt or sick and needs immediate medication, this is the best place for him.   
  
Sebastian doesn’t stir for two full days after the first homecoming, during which Chris faithfully keeps him warm and feeds him water and talks. And talks. And talks, until his voice creaks and croaks in his throat, brittle from overuse.   
  
His family comes in to spell him sometimes, ordering him to sleep. He does, but only fitfully. They might not talk to Sebastian right.   
  
The entire palace staff rejoices upon their return, though in a muted kind of way: they love Sebastian and they love Chris and Sebastian’s alive. But Sebastian doesn’t wake, and so maids and footmen speak in hushed voices and ask Chris repeatedly whether they might do anything to help. A charm for safe homecoming from someone’s brother. A thick wool sweater if Sebastian’s cold. The scents of Sebastian’s favorite foods, exotic imported avocados and fluffy scrambled eggs and honey-berry mead and blueberry _everything_.   
  
None of this works, though Chris tucks the sweater around him and nestles the carved wooden charm into a fabric-fold. Might help. Any kind of anchor. He makes sure to tell Sebastian who each gift is from.   
  
On the third afternoon, he tells a story about the time Sebastian’d learned knife-throwing tricks from a retired mercenary in a pub; Sebastian had been fifteen at the time, and had in fact gone looking for Chris, who at seventeen had decided he was adult enough to get drunk and couldn’t remember which pub he’d come out of when he’d gone to find a privy-stall. He’d ended up in a completely different place; Sebastian had very patiently explored multiple unsavory liquor-houses, discovered the Crown Prince emptying his stomach upon a large man’s boots, and placated said man with honest interest in the knives.   
  
He finishes this story with, “And Mom was horrified because, well, you were fifteen and a drunk mercenary gave you this incredibly expensive set of throwing knives, and you said, and I quote, yes, he was a very nice man, perfectly straight-faced, like you didn’t know what she was thinking, like she was going to have to explain sex and humans to you, and then you told her he said you reminded him of his son.” He stops, breathes, finishes with what he most remembers: “She knew I’d been out getting drunk and she knew you brought me back—by the way, she chewed me out not so much for the drinking but for what could’ve happened to you—and you never told her the part where you went into like eight pubs looking for me.”   
  
Because Sebastian’s forever been looking out for him. Because Sebastian’s been forever here. For him.   
  
He says, “I don’t even know how to say thank you, I mean not just for that, I mean for—” and then has to put his head down on the side of Sebastian’s bed in folded arms.   
  
He doesn’t cry much. His eyes hurt. Sore from tears and terrible emotion. He just lets a few bits of water escape and then stays there, hiding in the dark.   
  
When he looks up he’s not expecting anything.   
  
Sebastian’s eyelashes flutter.   
  
Sunlight’s glowing on the edge of the bed. The air’s dry and medicinal. The bed’s firm under his elbows when he leans forward. Every detail stands out, sharp-edged and breathless and poised.   
  
Sebastian sighs softly, and opens eyes.   
  
“Thank you,” Chris says, crying freely now, “thank you.”   
  
Sebastian tries to say something, coughs, closes his eyes again. Chris’s heart stutters. “Don’t move, don’t try to talk, don’t—just rest, please, just—”   
  
Sebastian, eyes still shut, whispers, “Chris?”   
  
“I’m here.” He grabs the closest hand. “I’m right here.”   
  
“Are you all right,” Sebastian asks, between ragged breaths, “and where are we?”   
  
“I’m fine, I’m great, everybody’s fine, we’re just worried about you.” He holds on more tightly. Relief and fear battle each other in his chest. “We’re home. In the infirmary. You, um…you’ve been asleep for a while.”   
  
Sebastian opens those eyes again. Pale blue, blue like winter skies and woodsmoke, like oceans under silvery rain. “We’re home?”   
  
“Yeah.” He bites a lip, plunges into the question: “Do you…recognize me? This place?”   
  
“I know you.” Sebastian’s eyebrows tug together. “I…think I know where we are. I don’t know…I can’t remember how we got here. What happened?”   
  
I love you, Chris nearly blurts out. The words fail on his tongue. Derailed by manifest confusion in those eyes. Plus a hint of apprehension: Sebastian knows there’s something Chris isn’t telling him. And Seb doesn’t need more to deal with, Chris’s emotions heaped atop everything else.   
  
Hell— _Chris_ loves him. But Sebastian’s never said anything, done anything, to indicate the same feelings on the other side.   
  
Familiar, Doctor Jackson’d said. Remind him of what he knows. An anchor.   
  
Chris’s sisters think Seb loves him. But they don’t know. Sebastian did die for him—but that could as easily be a loyal sibling type of love. Worse: a compulsion. If that’s why Sebastian’d been sent out of Fairyland in the first place: _to_ die for him.   
  
Hazy blue eyes are beginning to look alarmed at the lack of reply. Chris babbles, cursing his slowness, “It’s okay, everything’s okay, sorry, just—thinking. It’s a lot.” He rubs cold fingers with his. “We—you—killed a dragon. And, um. You. You sort of. Died.”   
  
Sebastian looks down at himself, then up at Chris.   
  
“Yeah, well…you came back. And you scared the hell out of me. I thought—” His voice breaks. He can’t go on.   
  
“Chris,” Sebastian says, struggling into a sitting position, gripping his hand. “Chris. I’m here. You didn’t lose me. I don’t remember anything after—after the dragon—but I’m still here.”   
  
“Still taking care of me…”   
  
“That’s what a good companion does,” Sebastian says gravely, and Chris laughs through tears.   
  
  
It becomes quickly apparent that Sebastian’s both essentially all right, in the sense of being able to get up and move around and function, and not all right at all, in a few nebulous ill-defined ways. Chris grits teeth. Must be his fault. Of course it is: he left Sebastian dead for a month. He didn’t hear right away. He should’ve done better.   
  
Sometimes when he looks at Sebastian’s face, white from exertion after climbing a flight of stairs, he has to look away. Guilt gnaws at his heart.   
  
Sebastian does improve, over days and weeks. He’s easily exhausted and doesn’t recall anything from the point at which he’d stepped between Chris and a dragon to waking up in the infirmary. He moves painstakingly, relearning balance and testing footing, but that much _is_ getting better: he explores and extends his limits very gingerly out in the Home Guard practice yard under the supervision of both Doctor Jackson and the brothers who serve as much-beloved weaponsmasters. He’s not his old self, but the gulf’s narrowing.   
  
Physically, at least.    
  
He’s quieter. He’s less demonstrative—or Chris thinks so until the day he catches Sebastian successfully running across the practice yard and then hugging one of the weaponsmaster Brothers Russo, falling into supportive arms, winded and triumphant. Sebastian glances up and knows he’s there; Chris, passing along the open corridor above, had known he’d be nearly done with the day’s rehabilitation and had been coming to find him, and spontaneously applauds. Sebastian nods his direction, registering the applause, but then turns back to Anthony and Joseph and says something, hand sketching a motion in the air.   
  
He doesn’t hug Chris. Not then, not when they meet up after.   
  
Sometimes when Chris does look at him, he flinches and looks down. As if affection from Chris hurts.   
  
He accepts a hand at his elbow on a staircase if the hand belongs to Scott, or to their mother, or to Sam, or to a palace maid or manservant. If Chris offers Sebastian seems to be trying to think of a way to politely say no.   
  
Sebastian hates him. Chris understands that. Of course those pale eyes blame him. Chris blames himself.   
  
Sebastian died for him. Sebastian’s hurt in some undefinable way that’s _not_ getting better—energy never quite restored—and, yes, Sebastian chose to come on the Quest, to throw himself in front of a dragon; but a person can have more than one emotion, and Sebastian can die for Chris and then resent having to live injured because of it.    
  
Sebastian notices that Chris has acquired minor elements of magic—difficult not to notice when another one of those underhearing moments billows into reality and Chris answers his mother’s questions before they’re asked. Sebastian asks what happened, and nods when told, and then gets even quieter than the now-usual for half a day. Chris can make a guess as to why: Sebastian’s not healing easily, Seb who’d once upon a time used magic to heal himself and Chris and once Scott’s broken arm; Sebastian’s clearly too tired for magic beyond being alive, and to watch Chris have it must be salt in an agonizing reminder of injury.   
  
Sebastian died for him, and so this time it’s Chris’s turn: his heart bleeds another trickle each time Sebastian laughs at one of Scott’s jokes but avoids breakfast with Chris by claiming he has an appointment in the infirmary. That’s true, Chris watches him meet Doctor Jackson at the door, but the scheduling’s suspicious and brutal as a dagger to the gut.    
  
I love you, Chris thinks, watching him go. I love you so much. I can never weigh you down with that. Not now.   
  
It’s not all painful. Sebastian’s alive. That joy suffuses the world. Worth every pain.   
  
And Sebastian doesn’t avoid him entirely. More than once Chris turns around to find winter-lake eyes following him out of a room. Taking a chair in the library when Chris is looking for a book. Hovering in the open doorway of Chris’s bedroom.   
  
He always asks if Seb wants to come in. Sometimes the answer’s yes and sometimes it’s no, unpredictably so. Even when it’s yes Sebastian doesn’t talk, only finds a spot to curl up long kitten-legs and watch him as if trying to sort out a mystifying puzzle-piece. That part Chris doesn’t understand.   
  
  
One afternoon he asks whether Sebastian wants to see the astronomy tower. Sebastian takes a deep breath, eyes searching Chris’s face as Chris holds perfectly still, afraid to exhale. Then nods.   
  
“It’s a brand-new telescope,” Chris says hopefully, and waves a hand grandly: a spring-fair showman demonstrating a wonder. “I kept the old one too, it’s over there, but this one’s got the best optic lenses the University could make, I thought maybe we could use it tonight, it should be a good night for that?”   
  
Sebastian smiles at him. Chris would buy a hundred telescopes, a thousand, for that smile.   
  
But the night turns out to be cold as icicles and broken bones, and Sebastian’s visibly drained by the end of dinner, pale and trying hard to hide it. Chris says, “Never mind, it’ll be there when you are,” and walks him to bed, and it’s a mark of how fatigued blue eyes must be that they accept his aid without protest.    
  
Chris builds up the fire in his room. Chris brings over blankets and hot tea. Sebastian’s already asleep, thin and depleted and lovely even so; the fairy-sharp lines of his cheekbones, his jaw, stand out in firelight. He doesn’t stir, and Chris sits with him all night, watching the motion of his breathing, dozing over the stupid erotic fairy-story book which he’d run next door to bring back as an inadequate present, drifting off in a bedside chair.    
  
When he wakes up in the morning Sebastian’s sitting up in bed and reading his book, but hands it back immediately, without a word.   
  
“It’s for you,” Chris says, heart bleeding again. “I bought it for you.” Sebastian looks at the cover and then at Chris’s face, and then puts the book on his night-table: a tentative setting-down of pages in place, as if he’s concerned that he’s doing it wrong.   
  
Chris beams at him.    
  
Chris then has no clue what else to do—Seb isn’t talking—and blunders through sentences. “I, um, do you feel up to food? Breakfast? Do you want something? Anything at all, the cooks’re dying to make you whatever you—oh fuck I didn’t mean dying, I—”   
  
“Anything’s fine.” Sebastian pulls up knees under his blankets, wraps arms around them. “I don’t—I don’t know. Tell them something that you want, and I’ll meet you at breakfast?”   
  
It’s a dismissal. Chris chokes down anguish like a thousand spears, and stumbles up out of the chair to go.   
  
“Chris,” Sebastian says.   
  
He spins around.   
  
“Something…warm?”   
  
The small question blunts spear-tips. Melts them into joy. “Yeah,” he scrapes out through overwhelming dizzy elation, “yeah, sounds great, I’ll just—go tell them—” and goes.   
  
  
After breakfast Sebastian vanishes. Chris panics. No one’s seen him. Not since porridge and cream and brown sugar and blueberry preserves and mountains of eggs and hot cinnamon cakes. Sebastian had smiled at him, brief as dandelion fluff in a breeze, when sitting down.   
  
Sebastian had been behind Scott as they got up to leave the breakfast room. Chris had wanted to catch his arm, to take his hand, to say—   
  
He’s dizzy now for a whole different reason. Not elation. Cinnamon sears his tongue, a reminder.   
  
“Chris,” his mother says, “he’ll turn up. He won’t leave you.”   
  
“He can’t even look at me half the time,” Chris bristles. “What if he’s hurt?”   
  
“He looks,” she informs him. “You’re just not looking at the same time. Can you hear him?”   
  
“Can I—” He’s not used to that even now. He closes his eyes. Puts a hand on the wall to steady himself. Listens: with physical ears, with intangible perceptions, stretching out and unfolding and trembling across the solid foundations of the palace.    
  
He doesn’t have much control, but the sensitivity’s grown more recognizable, a part of him rather than an uncanny interloper. It’s never developed further, so he won’t become a magic-wielding legendary sorcerer, but he does tend to know where people are around the castle.   
  
He can’t always find Sebastian. In and out, flickering like a candle on a windy day.   
  
Right now he can. Shining like blue and gold, like sapphires and sun. Battered but bright as a banner to his questioning thoughts.   
  
Sebastian’s in the infirmary. This lurching recognition causes him to lose focus—why’s Sebastian having more appointments with doctors, is he feeling worse, did Chris’s neglect overnight leave him cold and alone?—and he lunges for that wavering image and clings.   
  
Sebastian’s standing by a low bed, talking urgently; Sam’s shaking his head. Sebastian makes an irritated gesture, more emotion than Chris has seen from him in the last week, and more angry about it.   
  
“—I can’t,” Sam’s explaining. “I don’t know, okay?”   
  
“That’s not good enough. I need to know what’s wrong with me.”   
  
“Nothing’s exactly _wrong_ with you, kid. We just need to work on getting your strength back.”   
  
“There’s something!” More desperate this time. One hand catches Sam’s sleeve. “I can feel it! And if I’m not—not strong enough, if I’m hurt, if I can’t protect him when he needs that—you _have_ to help. Please.”   
  
“It’s not anything I can—”   
  
“Tell me,” Sebastian hisses, in a voice that suddenly powerfully reminds Chris that he’s not quite human, “because you know and I know you know, and do you want to know how I know? The fairy part of you knows. _Doctor_.”   
  
Sam stands very still, then. Poised.   
  
“I’ve always known,” Sebastian says tightly, “and I’ve never said, so please, please.”   
  
Chris, in the slippery mind’s-eye vision, sees Sam’s hand lift away from the scalpel. “It’s just a trace. My grandmother and my mother saw true. Sometimes.”   
  
“And fairies are still objects of suspicion, awe and wonder and fear among the superstitious populace, everyone wondering what you might do, you’d never have a normal life, I _know_.” Sebastian’s tone’s on edge but his eyes—   
  
Chris wants to cry for him, seeing those eyes.   
  
Sam grumbles, conquered by the eyes, “Sit down and be quiet and let me look at you for a minute, then, I’m not precisely practiced in this particular area, not part of the medical curriculum, but we’ll see what I got.” Sebastian does. The moment extends.   
  
And then it cracks, relaxing into normality like the release of a spring, with Sam’s voice. “Okay. So you know how magic works, probably better than I do. You know how it’s like—like a well, right? You dip a bucket in, you draw some water out, it refills itself over time? But what you did, coming pretty damn dramatically back to life…”   
  
“Oh.” Sebastian’s lips barely move. “I…see.”   
  
“You basically emptied the well at once, kid. I don’t know if it’ll fill in or stay dry. Maybe if you went back home—the other side of the border—”   
  
“No.”   
  
“You’d have magic in the air every time you take a damn breath, back home. Probably your best shot. You won’t get that here.”   
  
“I won’t leave him.”   
  
“Then that’s all I got. You won’t get any worse. You’re just…I don’t know. Human. _Almost_ human. You’ve got about a teaspoon left in that well, probably why you’re up and around so fast, considering you were, y’know, _dead_. You’ll always be a fairy.”   
  
Sebastian nods, taking this in. He’s sitting on the edge of the infirmary bed now, sleeves pushed up, hair falling forward when he glances down. He looks smaller and younger and more heartbreakingly beautiful than Chris has ever realized: being told just how much he’s given up for the man he chose to save.   
  
He also looks stronger. Like a hero.   
  
“I _am_ going to give you a couple of prescriptions,” Sam says. “Nothing big, but I know you get tired pretty quick and you’ve been getting headaches and you need to heal, and, hey, if you’re kinda more human, I actually get to practice medicine on you.”   
  
And Sebastian smiles, tiny but genuine.                                              
  
Chris surfaces dazed and panting. Sebastian’s hurt—having headaches— _human_.   
  
Mostly human. Not telling Chris about the headaches. Keeping secrets.   
  
Chris has a form of scattered slipshod magic, and once he puts two and two together he stays away from Sebastian all morning, sickened. Sebastian’s _always_ been magic-sensitive. It’s not only the reminder of loss that’s causing pain.   
  
One more way he’s failed the man he loves. No wonder Seb doesn’t love him back. Too slow, too stupid to figure that one out. Better that he stay buried under blankets in his bed with his idiocy forever. Better that he not come out when anyone knocks on his door.   
  
He puts Sebastian’s dead knife, the slender fire-melted hairpin of a knife that he’s kept in his pocket, away in a drawer.   
  
  
Sebastian, when Chris finally encounters him in the hallway outside the family dining chamber for the afternoon meal, says nothing about having been to the infirmary and nothing about headaches. He looks as if he’s been pacing; he looks worried. A line sits between dark eyebrows, though some of the tension goes out of his body when he sees Chris step out of the stairwell.   
  
Chris had almost not come. His mother’d requested his presence, though, and he can’t say no to her.   
  
Their eyes meet—Chris opens his mouth to ask, lifts a hand to touch his shoulder—but Sebastian’s gaze falls first. Down to flagstones, to shadows cast by light through open windows and stained glass.   
  
Words tangle in Chris’s throat.   
  
Scott comes bounding up, waving a copy of a gilt-edged pocket manuscript. “Hey! Come look at this, it’s the winter court masque, I’m going to be a forest god, I get to wear emerald tights!”   
  
Chris wants to put a fist through the tapestried wall.   
  
Sebastian looks up. Relief shines evident from his eyes. “That’s…wonderful. What sort of forest god? Fertility, wisdom, guardian spirit of the green?”   
  
“Kind of hoping fertility,” Scott says blithely, and tugs Sebastian into luncheon in his wake, chattering about codpieces.    
  
Chris, left behind, puts a hand on the wall for support. It nestles sympathetically under his palm, but can’t help.   
  
He doesn’t eat much. His stomach twists. Churns.   
  
Sebastian, sitting beside him, glances his way. Bites a lip, lets it go. Then, while listening politely to Scott’s rendition of an overblown monologue about falling leaves, picks up a bread roll, golden-topped and hot, and slides it onto Chris’s plate.   
  
Chris eats the bread roll. Some of the heat transfers to his stomach. Not enough, but some.   
  
  
Because he’s been opening himself up and inviting magic in, it refuses, in the manner of a smirking stray cat, to leave. He’s meaning to go back to his room and wallow in self-pity and sorrow and maybe some depressed charcoal drawings of Sebastian’s face; he’s nearly there when he recalls he’s left his sketchpad in the library, and he doubles back. He’s on the stairs when the vision punches him in the forebrain; he staggers, grabs the wall, catches breath.   
  
Sebastian. And Scott. In Scott’s room, where his younger brother’s apparently hauled his fairy off for a scolding, judging from the distressed pointing-of-fingers. No one else, naked or otherwise, is in Scott’s room for a change; Sebastian, flattened against the door, looks ruffled and dismayed and a tiny bit impressed. Chris’s first impulse is to charge down there and throw himself between surprised blue eyes and whatever asinine accusations his little brother’s making; but Sebastian seems upright and unharmed and actually energetic in response to whatever’s going on.    
  
“You have to say something!” Scott jabs the finger at him again. “I know theatre! This is a melodrama! Confess!”   
  
“To _you?”_   
  
“Sure, because I like knowing everything, but no! To him!”   
  
“You don’t understand—”   
  
“I understand that you’re hurt. I understand that you came back from the fucking dead. I understand that you’re hurting my brother by not talking to him. I can see his face. And I don’t care if you can’t climb a flight of stairs or sit in a room without a fireplace. You can say words. You’re saying words to me right now.”   
  
Even Sebastian’s hair radiates distress, backed up against Scott’s solid oak door. “I’m sorry—you don’t know—I’ve been trying, I know what it is now, I just need to find out how to fix it, so I can—”   
  
“How to fix _what?”_   
  
“I’m human!” Sebastian shouts back. Scott, never having seen Sebastian as anything other than a calmly amused competent second older brother, stops talking out of shock. “I’m human—well, _mostly_ —and I don’t know how to fix this, I’m too clumsy and I trip over nothing and my head aches half the time and that’s not even counting the _being dead part_ and I’m not _good_ enough anymore!”   
  
“What,” Scott says weakly, confronted with this onslaught, “what the fuck.”   
  
“I’m not good enough for him.” Sebastian slumps against the door. Drops his head back with a thud. “I never was, I knew that, but at least I had magic. I could help him. Now I’m fucking _useless_.”   
  
“Hang on,” Scott says, “I’m still working on the first part. You’re human now.”   
  
“More or less. Yes.”   
  
“And…you…think that makes you not good enough for him.”   
  
“Not like—not just because of—never mind.”   
  
“He loves you,” Scott says, “and you’re a moron. Human you, fairy you, whatever. Moron.”   
  
“You’re wrong.”   
  
“I was there when he thought you were dead. I _found_ him when he thought you were dead. He _said_ he loves you.”   
  
“He feels guilty because I died. It’s a romantic cliché.”   
  
“Seriously,” Scott says, addressing the ceiling, “this is like talking to a waterfall. It doesn’t listen and it just keeps making sounds. Have you _seen_ him lately?”   
  
“I am not a waterfall. I’m human. Minus a teaspoon.”   
  
“I don’t want to know what you’re doing with the teaspoons. He’s, like, pining.” Scott sighs, not unsympathetic, and leans against the wall next to Sebastian’s already claimed door. “He misses you. Talk to him.”   
  
“I can’t.”   
  
“You can’t even talk to him?”   
  
“I love him. I would die for him.”   
  
“You _did_.”   
  
“I always knew as much.” Sebastian bats Scott’s hand away from a touch. “The soothsayers told me. You’ll love a human prince, and you’ll die for him, and that will bring your kingdoms closer together, and I assume that last part’s why Chris has magic now. I knew I had to die. I never expected to come _back_. I don’t know what to do.”   
  
Scott holds up both hands. “Way too metaphysical for me. Way. But I will say this. You need to tell Chris everything you just told me.”   
  
“Chris is the last person who can ever know,” Sebastian retorts. “Chris deserves a proper Vision Quest and his chance at True Love. Not my interference.”   
  
“He saw _you_ in the Pool!”   
  
“Because I shouldn’t’ve come! I was in the way. I made it go wrong.” With a frustrated absentminded rumpling of hands through hair: “The prophecy said nothing with regard to whether he’d love me back. _Nothing_. He deserves to try again.”   
  
Scott stares at him. “You think the quest didn’t work?”   
  
“I know it didn’t.” Sebastian turns away, gazes at cavorting naked lovers in the tapestry on Scott’s wall. “He’s never—it’s not me. It shouldn’t’ve been me. He should’ve seen the person he’ll give his heart to. His True Love. And I can’t even help him, I can’t be with him when he tries again, in case—”   
  
“Sebastian,” Scott says, when that fairy-voice doesn’t seem inclined to go on. “What if he does love you?”   
  
Sebastian doesn’t look up despite Scott’s hand on his shoulder. “Don’t be ridiculous.”   
  
Chris, who cannot take this for one more second, throws himself down the stairs and bangs on Scott’s door. His brother opens it, not instantly, doubtless giving Sebastian time to get out of the way.   
  
“Sebastian?” Chris starts happily.   
  
The object of his question steps out from behind Scott, wary.   
  
“You think I don’t,” he announces. “But I do!” He does. He _does_. He’s overflowing with the joy of it. They blink. “Love you,” he adds swiftly. “I love you, Seb.”   
  
Sebastian’s mouth falls open. “How much of that did you hear?”   
  
“Um. Most?”   
  
Those blue eyes close up like winter thunderheads—not before they crack to show anguished wounds beneath. And Sebastian says, in a tone Chris has never heard from him before, “Then you’re saying it out of gratitude or pity, and I won’t thank you for either,” and disappears.   
  
Literally. Gone. Astonished air rushes in to fill the void.   
  
“Well,” Scott says, eyebrows up, “that’s one way to end a conversation.”   
  
“You idiot,” Chris breathes, unsure whether he means Scott or Sebastian or himself, “no, no, oh fuck no—he’s _hurt_ , he’s barely _alive_ , he doesn’t have any magic _left_ , this could—he might be—”   
  
Color drains from Scott’s face.   
  
Chris whispers, “We have to find him,” while his heart shatters inside his chest.

 

Scott summons searchers; they fan out across the castle. Chris, hoping, frantic, shuts his eyes and _tries_. His extra senses tug him in the direction of the library. Part intuition, part magic, part simply knowing Sebastian; he flings open doors and throws himself into book-lined walls.  
  
He trips over a chair; he stumbles. He spins in place, gaze raking across the room.  
  
He plunges over to that crumpled heap of slim muscles and dark hair. On the floor by the history shelf, the stories of their kingdom.  
  
Sebastian’s dead weight in his arms. Sebastian’s whiter than the pages of priceless alabaster manuscripts around them.  
  
Sebastian’s not breathing.  
  
“No,” Chris says, “ _no_ , dammit, Seb, you are _not going to die on me again_ —” and gathers up every ounce of his own strength and shouts into the void. _Sebastian!_  
  
Who gasps in a shocked lungful of air. His eyes snap open. “What—Chris—”  
  
“You _are_ a fucking idiot,” Chris says, “you’re hurt, why would you—please never—I love you, will you stay and actually listen to me this time, I love you,” and kisses him.  
  
Sebastian’s too surprised to kiss back for the first second. And then the surprise melts into amazement and desire, and his lips part, and he’s kissing Chris; he tastes like Chris’s tears and wild berries and cold skin that warms up under Chris’s love, and he’s saying words, _yes_ and _yes_ and _I’ve always_ and Chris’s name into the kiss.  
  
Chris holds him there on the library floor and kisses him and tells him again how stupid that was, using energy he doesn’t have to run away when Chris is right there; Sebastian’s cheeks are wet with tears when Chris cups his face with one big hand. This time neither of them flinches as every last wall comes down. As the universe gets reborn in tremulous delight.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Sebastian whispers, tilting his head into Chris’s hand. Chris can’t believe that they’ve never done this, he’s never touched Sebastian like this before; it feels so natural, those blue eyes honest and sweet as candied rose-petals, wholly and heartpoundingly given over to Chris’s touch and care. “I love you.”  
  
“You were scared,” Chris whispers back. “I know. Me too. Oh, Seb, fuck, me too, this whole time—”  
  
“You aren’t hurting me.” Sebastian kisses his palm. “You don’t. It’s like—feeling sunlight, your magic. Down in my bones. Home.”  
  
“I thought—”   
  
“I know. I’m sorry I scared you. I didn’t mean—”  
  
“I know,” Chris echoes, lifting his chin with a finger, leaning down for another kiss. “I heard.”  
  
They hold each other, this time.  
  
Steps thunder in the hallway, on the staircase. Bodies coming to find them. They’ve got a moment more in their private literary oasis; only a moment, and they’ll need to reassure the rest of the family, but for now this time is theirs.  
  
“Sebastian,” Chris offers, cradling him. “How’re you feeling?”  
  
“Tired,” Sebastian sighs, breath warm against Chris’s neck. “But no worse than usual. I don’t think I did any more permanent damage.”  
  
“It’s my turn to take care of you.” With a kiss to the top of his head. “I’m about nineteen years behind, right? Better get started. But I had a question, if you’re up to it.”  
  
“Not _all_ nineteen years,” Sebastian murmurs. “I didn’t know it was you at first. A human prince, they said, this kingdom.”  
  
“So…you might’ve been here for Scott? Nope.”  
  
“I knew I’d fall in love with one of you, and die to save that one…even when I thought I knew I had to make sure. Not a passing childhood daydream, not a single summer. But of course it was you. I waited, and it never went away, it just got stronger. Always you. _Never_ Scott.”  
  
Chris snorts reflexively, but his heart’s trapped by an earlier phrase. “You knew all along. You—fuck, you _knew_ you were going to die—for _me_ —how did you _live_ with—”  
  
“With that.” Sebastian’s smile’s tattered but luminous. “With knowing it would be to save you. And before you ask, I’d’ve chosen to in any case. I _did_ choose to.”  
  
“Oh…you…oh, Seb—”  
  
“Of course before that I spent a lot of time being terrified that any random day might be the day, and hoping it would come so I’d get it over with, and then just being glad to have one more day with you, year after year.”   
  
“Year after year…” He clears his throat. Stunned by the depths of devotion. Standing quietly at his side all this time. He’d never guessed. Now he _knows_. “About that. I did say I had a question.”  
  
“By all means,” Sebastian says, closer to his sarcastic affectionate self than Chris has seen in weeks, smiling.  
  
“I love you,” he says. “I can’t say always, not like you can, except I sort of can, I just didn’t know. But when I thought about my future you were in it. And I _did_ know before you—before I lost you. When you came with me. When, um, acid sand, and—and your hands, and I thought—I didn’t want to finish the Quest. I wanted to hold your hands in mine again. So, um, if that helps, I was starting to figure it out, I’m not _completely_ oblivious.”  
  
Sebastian’s laughing through tears, through emotion transcending exhaustion.  
  
“Sebastian,” Chris says, Chris asks him, “will you please marry me, because I’m a disaster without you and because you make me smile and you make me stronger and, um, oh, and I love you, you’re my One True Love, the magic water said so, and also I really like kissing you in the library?”  
  
Sebastian, laughing even more, gets out, “Yes, Chris, of course yes, you’re _my_ disaster—” and they’re kissing again when the library doors open and the world changes.  
  
  
That change isn’t just hearts and admissions. Chris thinks it is, thinks the golden haze in the air and the faint blowing of trumpets and the taste of sugared violets is only his senses, his giddy whirling brain; but Sebastian’s sitting up more and looking around too and then Scott and Chris’s mother burst in and Scott splutters, “Is that an _earthquake_ —”  
  
Sebastian breathes astonished words, not human, the low cadence he’d once used on Chris’s sword, the language of magic and desire. The language of enchantment. “It’s Fairyland.”  
  
Five Home Guard rush in and take up stalwart but baffled protective positions around the royal family; there’s nothing to fight, but the sense of quaking, of seismic shifts, grows stronger—  
  
Chris holds onto Sebastian. Whatever’s happening, that’s what he’s here to do. Faint halos of otherworldly colors appear; book spines streak and swirl and iridesce. The rug beneath them grows impossibly soft, puddling outward to the corners of the room. Glass rattles as windowpanes billow with rainbow-and-gold light.  
  
“Chris—” Seb’s eyes are huge, thrilled, full of sudden rainbow-washed insight. “It’s us, it’s the end of my prophecy, I thought that meant you but I was wrong—”  
  
“What?”  
  
The world lurches one last time and steadies. Books become books instead of kaleidoscopes. The rug’s only a rug. Windows cease streaming gold.  
  
But the gilded sweetness lingers. The brightness stays, etching wild patterns into ceilings, twining new vines into old tapestries, turning stone stairs to swirled marble and lapis lazuli. It hangs in the air like favorite scents, like fresh-baked bread and crisp green grass and spiced ale, like clouds of roses and cardamom and poppy and saffron and cinnamon; like the tightness of Sebastian’s fingers around his and everything that Chris loves, rolled up into a glowing everlasting day—  
  
And an alarmed palace chambermaid with hiked-up skirts dashes through the library door and pants, “Majesty—Highnessses—in the courtyard, there’re horses and dancers and ribbons and flowers and _fairies_ and a _Queen_ —”  
  
“My mother,” Sebastian says, laughter warring with disbelief; and Chris looks at him, really _looks_ , and he’s stronger, more alert, brighter-cheeked, drinking in magic with every breath. “I think you all guessed about the royalty part, but, ah, I hope you don’t mind that the Prince you’re marrying is, er, a Fairy Prince—”  
  
“Do I _look_ like I mind? Come here and I can show you how much I don’t mind—”  
  
“I love kissing you in the library. —but anyway I was wrong, I thought, oh, Chris, I thought it just meant you’d have magic and I’d’ve sacrificed myself and the realms would grow closer over that, start to talk at last, perhaps, but—but you asked me to _marry_ you—”  
  
“What did your prophecy actually _say?”_  
  
“That I’d love a human prince of the kingdom over the border, and I’d die to save him, and that would bind our realms more closely together—” Sebastian’s on his feet now, leaning on Chris but not half as much as he would’ve needed to moments ago. “Chris, I think we—”  
  
“Sebastian,” Scott asks pathetically, directed at the person who seems to have marginally more answers than the rest of them, “what’s going on?”  
  
Queen Lisa gets up as well; even brushing momentary fright and library-floor dust-bunnies and magic motes from her day dress, she’s a monarch and a mother to her kingdom and her family. “I expect we should go down and greet Chris’s future mother-in-law. Sebastian, please tell me how I’m supposed to address a Fairy Queen.”  
  
“You’re my mother too,” Sebastian says, holding out his spare hand to take hers, squeezing it. “Since I was twelve. She’ll know that. So…what I’m saying is I really don’t know. We’re family. And I think we’re a piece of Fairyland now as well.”  
  
“We’re what?” Scott puts in, taking his mother’s hand on the other side: a family standing together with magic beyond the library door. “Can we do magic now too? Like Seb?”  
  
“No,” Chris says, looking at Sebastian, who’s stayed secure in the circle of his arm. “We’re not just a piece of Fairyland. We’re human. Closer together, in the middle, sort of. Like you said. We’re…something new. Right?”  
  
Sebastian’s smile’s more brilliant than the newborn splendor around them. “Yes.”  
  
“So let’s go meet your mother,” Chris says, “and, um, open up…diplomatic relations with Fairyland, and…plan a wedding? How do fairies get married?”  
  
“I’m sure my mother’ll tell us,” Sebastian says dryly as they start down gold-wreathed surprisedly now-marble stairs, “which is good, because I’ve lived with you long enough that I honestly have no idea. I think flower crowns may be involved.”  
  
“I can live with flower crowns,” Chris decides as the Home Guard race to open up the palace gates and let the waiting enchantment pour in and the uncharted future begin, “because, y’know, I also get to live with you.”


End file.
